(Il)legal Deposits: Ulysses and the Copyright Libraries

Abstract

Abstract This article addresses an unexamined facet of the institutional history of James Joyce's Ulysses : its accession in the closing months of 1922 into the holdings of the United Kingdom's six copyright libraries. It charts when and how these accessions were made, and what they reveal about the marketing, circulation, and readership of Joyce's novel in the United Kingdom at the height of its suppression. By examining the legislative conditions which rendered the legal deposit of Ulysses possible and desirable for Joyce in 1922, it offers a more nuanced sense of how Joyce and his contemporaries sought to infiltrate (and found themselves willingly assimilated into) a crucial institutional stronghold of Britain's dominant cultural order. In doing so, it complicates traditional narratives of the clash between an autonomous avant-garde and a nebulously-conceived ‘censor’ by exploring the mediating role the copyright libraries and the mechanisms of legal deposit played in such disputes.